Generating Query Recommendations via LLMs

TL;DR

This paper introduces GQR, a novel generative approach using large language models for query recommendation that performs well without requiring training data, and enhances it with retrieval-augmented techniques.

Contribution

The paper proposes GQR, a training-free generative query recommendation method using LLMs, and introduces RA-GQR, which incorporates query logs for improved performance.

Findings

GQR achieves state-of-the-art NDCG@10 and clarity scores.

RA-GQR outperforms GQR with an 11% NDCG@10 increase.

System received 59% user preference in a blind study.

Abstract

Query recommendation systems are ubiquitous in modern search engines, assisting users in producing effective queries to meet their information needs. However, these systems require a large amount of data to produce good recommendations, such as a large collection of documents to index and query logs. In particular, query logs and user data are not available in cold start scenarios. Query logs are expensive to collect and maintain and require complex and time-consuming cascading pipelines for creating, combining, and ranking recommendations. To address these issues, we frame the query recommendation problem as a generative task, proposing a novel approach called Generative Query Recommendation (GQR). GQR uses an LLM as its foundation and does not require to be trained or fine-tuned to tackle the query recommendation problem. We design a prompt that enables the LLM to understand the specific recommendation task, even using a single example. We then improved our system by proposing a version that exploits query logs called Retriever-Augmented GQR (RA-GQR). RA-GQr dynamically composes its prompt by retrieving similar queries from query logs. GQR approaches reuses a pre-existing neural architecture resulting in a simpler and more ready-to-market approach, even in a cold start scenario. Our proposed GQR obtains state-of-the-art performance in terms of NDCG@10 and clarity score against two commercial search engines and the previous state-of-the-art approach on the Robust04 and ClueWeb09B collections, improving on average the NDCG@10 performance up to ~4% on Robust04 and ClueWeb09B w.r.t the previous best competitor. RA-GQR further improve the NDCG@10 obtaining an increase of ~11%, ~6\% on Robust04 and ClueWeb09B w.r.t the best competitor. Furthermore, our system obtained ~59% of user preferences in a blind user study, proving that our method produces the most engaging queries.